Perfectionism I’m increasingly convinced, is not at all about maintaining high standards. Writers like Brené Brown have been helpful for me in naming this dynamic: perfectionism as a defence against vulnerability rather than a pursuit of excellence. Similarly, Donald Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” offers a quiet corrective. Not a lowering of standards, but a recalibration—an insistence that aliveness matters more than polish.
What I’m experimenting with, imperfectly, is letting things move sooner. Allowing the work to be seen in earlier stages. Trusting that clarity often emerges through expression rather than prior to it. It’s a small shift, but it changes the atmosphere completely. Less pressure. More momentum.
If this feels familiar, I’ll be exploring these patterns—and offering some practical ways through them—in tomorrow’s workshop, Overcoming Perfectionism and Taming the Inner Critic (Tuesday 5 May | 7.30–9.00pm UK time | £12). You can register here: https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/314377652/
And if you’re looking for something more sustained, I currently have one space open for 1–1 coaching. It’s a chance to work with these patterns at a deeper level, in a way that’s both rigorous and, importantly, kind.
There is something uncomfortably revealing about the creative projects we keep putting off “for later.” The ones we abandon outright are easier to narrate, to explain away, to file under “not quite right” or “no longer aligned.” But the projects we hold on to with a kind of reverence but never actually commit to have a lot to say about what we truly value.
I’ve been thinking about this a great deal recently, not least because I’ve found myself in the thick of planning and filming new material for The Art of Creative Practice, which, this autumn, will expand into a new interactive community with a dedicated app. It’s a project that, in one sense, has been years in the making through the accumulation of methods, fragments of teaching, and lived experiments in what it might mean to treat creativity as a way of approaching the world. In another sense, it has only just begun, precisely because I’ve stopped waiting for it to become something more perfect, more complete, more defensible.
I’m reminded here of something in Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: the idea that most artists are defeated not by a lack of talent, but by the fear of making something imperfect. The projects we keep “for later” are often the ones we’ve invested with the highest symbolic stakes. They are not just projects: they are proxies for who we think we might be, if only we could get them right.
And so we wait…
But waiting, as it turns out, isn’t a neutral act. It shapes the project just as much as doing does. It introduces a kind of conceptual inflation: the longer something is delayed, the more significant it seems to become, and the more it has to carry. No wonder it becomes increasingly difficult to begin.
There’s a tension here that I see often in my coaching work, and that I recognise in myself: the pull between the desire for integrity and the reality of practice. Integrity asks for coherence, for alignment, for something that feels “true.” Practice, on the other hand, is messy, iterative, frequently disappointing. The danger is that we place integrity at the end of the process—something to be achieved once the work is finished—rather than at the beginning, as a commitment to showing up honestly, even (especially) when the work is unfinished.
This is where the projects we defer become instructive. They show us, quite precisely, where our thresholds are. What feels too important to risk? What feels too revealing to share? What feels too central to our identity to be allowed to fail?
In my own case, fully developing an app-based community for The Art of Creative Practice has long occupied that space. It sits at the intersection of so many things I care about: creativity as a spiritual practice, the relationship between inner life and outer action, and increasingly, the connection between creativity and ecology, that is, what it might mean to create in a way that is responsive to, and in relationship with, the more-than-human world.
Over the past months, as I’ve been filming and shaping this new material, I’ve had to let go of a certain fantasy of what the project should be. This feels important to say, because it’s easy to assume that projects like this emerge fully formed, or that there is a moment of clarity in which everything clicks into place. In reality, it’s much closer to what Donald Schön called “reflection-in-action”—a kind of thinking that happens through doing, where the work itself becomes the site of inquiry.
There’s also something relational at play here. One of the reasons I’m building this next phase of The Art of Creative Practice as a dedicated app and year-long journey is precisely to create a more vibrant, dialogical space for this kind of unfolding. The older model—content delivered, consumed, and completed—feels increasingly insufficient for the kind of work I’m interested in. Creativity, especially when understood as a spiritual or ecological practice, is not something we do alone. It is shaped through conversation, through encounter, through the subtle feedback loops of community.
More on this in the coming weeks and months, but for now it feels like a significant shift: from holding the project back until it is “ready,” to allowing it to develop in public, in relation.
If there is a question running through all of this, it might be this: what would it mean to bring one of your “for later” projects slightly closer? Not to complete it, not to perfect it, but simply to reduce the distance between where it is and where you are.
And if perfectionism feels like a particularly strong thread in all of this, I’m running a workshop next week that speaks directly to it:
We’ll be working with some of these dynamics in a practical, grounded way, looking at how the inner critic operates, and how we might begin to relate to it differently, without needing to silence it entirely.
For now, though, I’m returning to the question I began with. The projects we keep “for later” are not just deferred tasks. They are, in many cases, small maps of our inner landscape. They show us where we hesitate, where we hope, where we protect something that feels, inarticulately, important.
The invitation is not to force those projects into the present, but to become curious about the distance we’ve placed between ourselves and them. To ask, gently but persistently: what am I waiting for?
Creative practice is one of the few places where procrastination can masquerade as discernment.
In most areas of life the difference between the two is fairly easy to spot. If you delay replying to an email for three weeks, you are probably not engaging in a subtle process of ethical reflection. If you keep postponing a dentist appointment, you are unlikely to be waiting for the right aesthetic conditions to emerge. Procrastination, in most domains, looks exactly like what it is.
Creative work is different. Here, hesitation can feel virtuous. Delay can wear the coat of taste. Not doing something can look like a form of artistic integrity. The line between genuine discernment and sophisticated avoidance becomes very thin.
This is one of the reasons creative practice can become psychologically complex. It sits at the intersection of imagination, identity, and judgment. We are not just deciding what to do—we are deciding whether what we do will be worthy of the version of ourselves we hope to become.
The philosopher and theologian Josef Pieper once wrote that leisure is the basis of culture. What he meant wasn’t idleness in the modern sense, but a kind of receptive attentiveness to reality. Creative work often begins in this receptive space. We listen before we speak. We wait before we write.
But the receptive state can also become a hiding place.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently while preparing a few things for the coming week. Ostara is approaching, thel seasonal threshold into Spring hat invites a little reflection and reorganisation. My houseplants are beginning to look as if they want to wake up again. A few of them clearly need repotting and I have been making notes about some spring recipes I want to experiment with.
These kinds of seasonal rhythms often nudge my creative life back into motion. Gardening and writing share a certain temperament. Neither responds well to frantic effort, but both require regular engagement. You cannot simply contemplate tomatoes into existence. At some point, you have to put your hands in the soil.
Writing is similar. The American writer Annie Dillard once observed that ‘how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ In creative work, however, the daily decision is often framed differently. The question becomes: is this the right moment to act, or should I wait for greater clarity?
Sometimes the answer genuinely is to wait.
Discernment is real. Ideas need time to ripen. A paragraph written too early can flatten something that needed to remain fluid for a while. Anyone who has done serious creative work knows that forcing an idea before it is ready often produces something strangely lifeless.
But procrastination has learned the language of discernment remarkably well. It says things like: this project deserves better conditions. Or: I should do more research first. Or: I just need a slightly clearer structure before I begin.
These can all be reasonable thoughts. They can also be remarkably effective forms of delay. The sociologist Robert Merton once wrote about what he called “trained incapacity”, the strange phenomenon where the very skills we develop become obstacles in new contexts. I sometimes think something similar happens to experienced creative practitioners. As our taste improves, so does our capacity for hesitation. We become more aware of the gap between what we imagine and what we can currently produce.
The result can be a kind of elegant paralysis. This is one of the reasons community can be so helpful in creative work. When we work entirely alone, discernment and procrastination can blur together indefinitely. When we show up in a room with others—especially others who are also doing the work—things tend to become clearer.
This is something I see regularly in the coworking and coaching sessions I run. Someone arrives saying they have been “thinking about” a project for weeks. Then we spend twenty-five minutes writing together, and suddenly several pages exist.
It turns out the idea was ready all along.
The ancient bards had a word for the mysterious source of creative inspiration: Awen. But they also understood that inspiration rarely arrives in a vacuum. It tends to visit people who are already working.
This is why I have been putting so much energy recently into building spaces where that working energy can gather.
If you are curious about how this kind of creative structure works in practice, I am hosting a free session this week where you can experience it directly:
The session is designed as a gentle introduction to the rhythm of the circle: a short teaching, a guided creative exercise, and some focused writing time together. Many people find that even one hour like this can unlock a surprising amount of momentum.
And for those who want a deeper container for their work, the full programme begins the following week:
Over twelve weeks we work with the deeper structures of creative practice: inspiration, discipline, craft, and community. It is part workshop, part coaching space, and part creative fellowship.
Alongside this group work, I also offer 1-1 creative coaching for writers and thinkers who want more personalised support. These sessions can be particularly helpful if you feel stuck in that grey zone between discernment and delay. Sometimes a single conversation can clarify what the next step actually is.
In the meantime, the small seasonal rituals continue. I will probably spend some time this week repotting a few herbs and planning those spring recipes. The shift from winter to early spring always feels like a useful reminder that creative work rarely moves in straight lines.
There are seasons of incubation. Seasons of emergence. Seasons of pruning.
But the key thing—the thing that separates discernment from procrastination—is that the work eventually returns to the page.
The soil is turned. The seed is planted. And something begins
